Help To Buy Platinum: Helping Generation Rent in the Budget
Three ways that the Chancellor, Philip Hammond, can play with the tax system to come to the aid of renters.
With the Budget coming up next month, a friend has suggested three variations of the old Help To Buy policy that the Conservatives might use to lighten pressure on Generation Rent.
- Help To Buy Platinum Edition
The pitch: Give a tax break to people buying second homes or spiffy pads in central London
Pros for renters: Supporters claim that if the rich can save a few tens of thousands pounds on a house this will be a great thing for everybody. Some rich people will buy an obscene mansion, selling their standard mansion to not-quite-as-rich people, who might sell their family home to some not-so-rich people, who might sell their flat to you, if you’re lucky.
2. Help To Blair aka tax breaks for landlords
The pitch: Give a tax break to landlords so it’s cheaper for them to buy more houses. Apparently named Help To Blair due to Cherie Blair’s enthusiasm for buy-to-let and her recent attempts to fight off a tax adjustment aimed at a small number of landlords who don’t pay enough tax.
Pros for renters: Supporters claim that if we just let landlords buy all our existing houses and rent them out to us, then rents will fall for everyone. Also if landlords can keep minimising their taxable income by borrowing lots of money, that means house prices stay out of reach, which is a good thing as most people prefer to rent these days.
3. Help to Build
The pitch: Give a tax break to anyone who will efficiently add a lot of decent, decently-priced accommodation to the housing supply.
Pros for renters: The faster that new housing units can be occupied by renters, the further rents will come down in price (or at least stop going up). A tax incentive for the build-to-rent sector, in which single companies build and manage a big block of flats, would help. It means property comes to the rental market much more quickly than when a developer builds luxury flats and sells them off one-by-one to different landlords.
